🔶 Immigrants who join an anti-immigration party

🔻Report by Mitra Shajaei

“we will hunt them down”; this famous line by Alexander Gauland, one of the founders of the Alternative for Germany (AfD) party, was said the night when the results of Germany’s 2017 parliamentary election were announced, when the AfD for the first time managed to enter the German parliament with 13.4% of the votes.

Although the line was apparently addressed to Angela Merkel, then Chancellor of Germany, many saw it as a threat to other democratic parties.

Now, 9 years later, this line has at least been put into practice in one German state; the AfD became the strongest party in Saxony-Anhalt, winning 43.8% of the vote, while Merkel’s party, the Christian Democratic Union, managed to secure only 17.2% of the votes of the dissatisfied and angry voters in this eastern German state.

The other two major parties in Germany, the Social Democrats and the Greens, each managed to win only about 9% of the votes.

The Alternative for Germany has been classified by the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (Germany’s domestic security agency) as a far-right movement.

The state branch of this agency in Saxony-Anhalt has also classified AfD since 2023 as a “proven far-right” movement.

Many senior members of this party have spoken openly against immigrants, Muslims, and some other minorities.

For example, Alice Weidel, one of the party’s two leaders, said in her speech in the German parliament in 2018: “Burqas, girls in headscarves, overweight men who are breadwinners of the state, and other incompetent people—will not guarantee our welfare, economic growth, and especially our social security system.”

Björn Höcke, another state leader of this party, in 2017 used a derogatory term to say: “We should stop the excessive mass immigration of an overly large African population to Europe.”

In addition to these, the party has introduced a word into Germany’s political culture that can catch every immigrant: remigration, or “reverse migration.”

Daniel Sepahri, an author and journalist born in Paderborn, Germany, who considers himself Iranian-German, has said that the “reverse migration” program of the Alternative for Germany is essentially the same as “deportation.” In a statement to Deutsche Welle, he says: “Their intention with this is not only ‘criminals,’ but includes all immigrants. They make a distinction between ‘pure Germans’ and ‘Germans with a migration background’; for them, the second group are only second-class Germans.’”

📌 Read the full text of the report on the website of Deutsche Welle Persian.